iGUESS: "Resistance is futile" they told us. And they were right. And we gave in.
Instead of what we expected- the usual "egad- Grandpa 'friended' me on Facebook"- our progeny actually forced us to sign up and waste an inordinate amount of our formerly precious time.
It was not just familial insistence- there are now people whose email accounts are so jammed with spam that they no longer open them in favor of being "liked," "shared," and "poked."
It's not all bad. For those who have been on another planet, on Facebook one can "share" practically anything on-line these days at the click of a mouse and they show up in your friends' "news feed"- although the word "news" is often a misnomer.
And who'd a thunk it? All our "friends" seem to be radical lefties who, for the last few weeks have been posting every article available on the "Occupy Wall Street" protests.
We've received slews of hand selected commentaries on corporate greed and related subjects like sustainability and consumerism.
Many of the protesters apparently bemoan our corporate culture which thrives on creating demand for products that we didn't even know we wanted much less needed until we saw the clever ads and decided that, although yesterday we'd never contemplated owning one, now we suddenly can't live without it. Then, as soon as we all own one, our corporate overlords and marketing geniuses suddenly come up with something else we never knew we needed to replace what we just bought so we can throw that "old" crap in the closet and buy the latest thing. More money for more junk, to consume more electricity- all to fill the pockets of more bazillionaires.
Then yesterday- and you probably know where we're going with this- all our radical activist "friends" suddenly took a day off from attacking unsustainable consumerist greed because they were apparently devastated by the death of Steve Jobs... the king of "acceptable" consumerism.
Although we've been one of those eye-rollers at those who pray at the altar of Apple, we're no less schizophrenic in our habit of using a computer and the internet to research and write, if not actual Luddite-themed tomes, then certainly anti-consumerist and even anti-capitalist screeds.
We're not sure why, for many, Steve Jobs sits at the right hand of god while Bill Gates works fanning the flames of hell for Satan. Is it because Jobs seemed to anticipate what we would decide we needed once he purveyed it while Gates merely filled the demanded niche before anyone else? Why is the size of Gates' wallet a topic that spurs anger from we in the new anti-corporate greed movement which is entrenched on Wall Street- and increasingly every city and town across the country- while no one even cares that Jobs left a tiny bundle upon his departure, thank you very much?
We don't own an iPad, an iPhone or an iAnything and have no desire to do so. Heck, we don't even own a cell phone and can be caught complaining to those who do about how, just as "they" perfected the sound in telephones so that voices on the other side of the world come through landlines like we're in the same room, someone went out and invented a device that make Bell's first phone sound clear as a bell in comparison.
We own a the biggest-bang-for-the-cheapest-price PC we could find and constantly kvetch about how the broadband for which we Americans pay $50 a month goes for under ten buck across Europe.
But that doesn't excuse us for the same hypocrisy as the Jobs worshipers practice.
We can remember a conversation a while back with a close friend bemoaning the way our agricultural lands were being lost to agricultural condominiumization. Then she suddenly got a tear in her eye and asked "well w-w-where's m-m-my ag condo?".
So go ahead and preach sustainability while you snatch up the the next "i" product you didn't know you needed until you saw it and then wondered how you could possibly have lived without. It's all part of being an American consumer.
And unless and until we think about it, most of us wouldn't have it any other way.
Showing posts with label Consumerism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Consumerism. Show all posts
Friday, October 7, 2011
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
ONE WORD BEN: PLASTICS
ONE WORD BEN: PLASTICS: Back before late ’08 when the bottom fell out of the free-for-all, credit-spawned, consumerism bubble it was common to hear people bemoan the gobble, gobble, gobble of your typical over fed, too-much-stuff turkey-American.
But in spite of the hope of many that perhaps the crash presaged a new era of right-sized consumption, we’ve gone right back to our old, traditional, grab-it-while-you-can rituals, like Coneheads demanding the restoration of our right to “consume mass quantities”.
And as if to underline the way that, when challenged to do the very least we can do- and we mean the very least- we act like whiny, weaned infants demanding the restoration of our endless supply of teat.
So it shouldn’t be any surprise that, backed by a wave of sniveling, self-centered assholes, Councilperson Mel Rapozo is trying to make sure the baby has his bottle by reversing the ban on plastic grocery bags that went into effect last month.
And make no mistake about it. This would be a reversal.
According to Joan Conrow’s post yesterday the bill would exempt “Food Service Establishment(s)” and defines them as
any building, vehicle, place, or structure, or any room or division in a building, vehicle, place, or structure where food is prepared, served, or sold for immediate consumption on or in the vicinity of the premises; called for or taken out by customers; or prepared prior to being delivered to another location for consumption. This term includes, but not limited to restaurants; coffee shops; cafeterias; short-order cafes; luncheonettes; taverns; lunchrooms; places which manufacture wholesale or retail sandwiches or salads; institutions, both public and private; food carts; itinerant restaurants; industrial cafeterias; and catering establishments.
That of course means that every supermarket with a “deli” on the island is exempt, as is any place that “prepares food” even if all you do is serve coffee.
This is supposedly about “health issues” and maintaining “sanitary conditions” but it’s anything but.
What kind of slobs are these people that they can’t make sure their takeout doesn’t spill all over the place without rewrapping it in a plastic grocery bag? Don’t forget that those plastic bags that people use to wrap fruits an veges and meats are already exempt.
But that’s not enough for your fat, pre-diabetic ass? You obviously need all that greasy, fat-laden gravy on your nutritionless white rice but are you such freakin’ pigs that you can’t get your slop from the store into your pie hole without spilling it all over your morbidly obese lap?
All that plastic that the deli wraps your food in isn’t enough for ya, eh? You need another bag to put it all in, in anticipation of the fact that you’re in such a rush to cram more garbage down your gullet that can’t get out of the store without spilling it on you $500 designer jeans.
Health? If you cared about health you wouldn’t be eating all that processed pre-prepared crap and go home and cook a real meal.
Sanitation? You mean after you’re careless enough to let your stuff spill out into the bag you’re so intent on getting every last drop into that gaping maw of yours that you’ve gotta lick the bag?
Perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of this bellyaching gripe session that’s been going on since the ban is that it comes from people who claim to be nature lovers and even environmental activists.
If you love your plastic grocery bags so much why don’t you go live in the Texas-sized plastic bag gyre out in the middle of the Pacific? Perhaps you should go on a diet of the shearwaters, dolphins and turtles the bags kill.
If you can’t live without your nasty plastic grocery bags maybe we should make ones big enough to wrap you in when we bury you in the ground... we wouldn’t want to spill you and make a mess on the way to the cemetery.
But in spite of the hope of many that perhaps the crash presaged a new era of right-sized consumption, we’ve gone right back to our old, traditional, grab-it-while-you-can rituals, like Coneheads demanding the restoration of our right to “consume mass quantities”.
And as if to underline the way that, when challenged to do the very least we can do- and we mean the very least- we act like whiny, weaned infants demanding the restoration of our endless supply of teat.
So it shouldn’t be any surprise that, backed by a wave of sniveling, self-centered assholes, Councilperson Mel Rapozo is trying to make sure the baby has his bottle by reversing the ban on plastic grocery bags that went into effect last month.
And make no mistake about it. This would be a reversal.
According to Joan Conrow’s post yesterday the bill would exempt “Food Service Establishment(s)” and defines them as
any building, vehicle, place, or structure, or any room or division in a building, vehicle, place, or structure where food is prepared, served, or sold for immediate consumption on or in the vicinity of the premises; called for or taken out by customers; or prepared prior to being delivered to another location for consumption. This term includes, but not limited to restaurants; coffee shops; cafeterias; short-order cafes; luncheonettes; taverns; lunchrooms; places which manufacture wholesale or retail sandwiches or salads; institutions, both public and private; food carts; itinerant restaurants; industrial cafeterias; and catering establishments.
That of course means that every supermarket with a “deli” on the island is exempt, as is any place that “prepares food” even if all you do is serve coffee.
This is supposedly about “health issues” and maintaining “sanitary conditions” but it’s anything but.
What kind of slobs are these people that they can’t make sure their takeout doesn’t spill all over the place without rewrapping it in a plastic grocery bag? Don’t forget that those plastic bags that people use to wrap fruits an veges and meats are already exempt.
But that’s not enough for your fat, pre-diabetic ass? You obviously need all that greasy, fat-laden gravy on your nutritionless white rice but are you such freakin’ pigs that you can’t get your slop from the store into your pie hole without spilling it all over your morbidly obese lap?
All that plastic that the deli wraps your food in isn’t enough for ya, eh? You need another bag to put it all in, in anticipation of the fact that you’re in such a rush to cram more garbage down your gullet that can’t get out of the store without spilling it on you $500 designer jeans.
Health? If you cared about health you wouldn’t be eating all that processed pre-prepared crap and go home and cook a real meal.
Sanitation? You mean after you’re careless enough to let your stuff spill out into the bag you’re so intent on getting every last drop into that gaping maw of yours that you’ve gotta lick the bag?
Perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of this bellyaching gripe session that’s been going on since the ban is that it comes from people who claim to be nature lovers and even environmental activists.
If you love your plastic grocery bags so much why don’t you go live in the Texas-sized plastic bag gyre out in the middle of the Pacific? Perhaps you should go on a diet of the shearwaters, dolphins and turtles the bags kill.
If you can’t live without your nasty plastic grocery bags maybe we should make ones big enough to wrap you in when we bury you in the ground... we wouldn’t want to spill you and make a mess on the way to the cemetery.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
TERMINAL INBREEDING
TERMINAL INBREEDING: That once profound truism about the Chinese character that stands for both crisis and opportunity has become so ubiquitous in the last few decades that it’s now taught in kindergarten.
But it’s become quite obvious it’s about as meaningless to supposedly reborn Obamerica as any five-year-old’s nursery rhyme when you look at the schizophrenic manner with which we are treating this so-called economic crisis.
The last eight years crystallized all that is wrong with Americans- that’s right, not just America but Americans.
Thinking back only a few years ago it was painfully obvious that something was wrong and that our unregulated, free market, fast-food, disposable culture was about to collapse of its own weight and design.
Many saw a silver lining in the insane economic practices in that when it all did collapse the opportunity to institute a new sustainable model would be so robust as to make going back to our old ways impossible.
But when the rubber met the road as it has in the last year or so, when the rotten fruits of our pie-hole stuffing ethos stood naked before the same people who screamed for sustainability, they began begging for one last chance to patch up the bullet riddled corporate corpus and individual greed that is at the root of the debacle.
“Do something- anything” we scream to our DC politicians, “but don’t take away my 30-minute delivered pizza or my 75” flat screen TV”.
“Reign in the Wall Street crooks and jail the bankers and insurance companies who caused this” we scream “but don’t take away any of my six 0% Platinum Visa cards.”
“It’s time to institute ‘Zero Waste’ programs” we beg as we gobble up our GMO-corn-fed fatburger plate lunch and toss the Styrofoam container in an opaque trash can to be transferred to someone else’s backyard where we can’t see or smell it.
“We all need to use public transportation” we yell out the window of our gas guzzling jalopy that’s forever stuck in traffic gridlock.
Within a few days- or even hours- America will be spending another trillion dollars. But in typical “fire, ready, aim” fashion none of the fundamentals of the economic system that got us here will have been reversed, redefined, revised or re-regulated before we do.
Even though we see clearly how the insanity of mindless consumerism bought us all dwellings with funny money to go with our $100,000 in consumer debt, we yet again bow down to the gods of mindless purchasing when told that if we want this crisis to magically end, the banks must start lending and we must start spending money that doesn’t exist... again.
What are we- a bunch of freakin’ idiots?
It’s far worse than doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It’s like we know exactly what we are doing to cause our demise but instead of doing less of it we think our only chance is to buy enough bubble gum, paper clips and duct tape to make Humpty Dumpty, if not whole, at vaguely least egg-shaped..
We look around and see millions of unemployed and look into the precipice of a new great depression but is our response to examine why those jobs selling each other chalupas, texting minutes and Hummers are disappearing?
No our new leader says – we just need to pump cash into the pockets of those who provided those jobs so they can create more of the same stupid, needless and destructive jobs.
No, our new leader says- we will make sure the construction workers who built all those now-empty houses can keep building useless and long-term destructive structures and more highways and more bridges for our personal, dirty sooty-carbon-spewing, oversized driving machines instead of clean green public transport.
No, our new leader says- even though we know exactly who created this fiscal mess and how it happened, instead of first ending the derivative, hedge-fund, shareholder comes first, rich get richer, theft-based approach we’ll just pump another trillion on top of the last trillion into the economically and morally bankrupt practices of the past.
Apparently the same people who were shrieking “sustainability” last year are now looking for all the old unsustainable economic models and practices to make them whole again so that then and only then can they work on sustainable solutions.
Today, on the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, the witching hour is upon us. It’s time to ask if we are just plain too dumb to survive.
If our response to today’s opportunity is to panic at the prospect of tomorrow’s crisis perhaps our last best chance to sustain- in fact survive- as a species has come and gone.
But it’s become quite obvious it’s about as meaningless to supposedly reborn Obamerica as any five-year-old’s nursery rhyme when you look at the schizophrenic manner with which we are treating this so-called economic crisis.
The last eight years crystallized all that is wrong with Americans- that’s right, not just America but Americans.
Thinking back only a few years ago it was painfully obvious that something was wrong and that our unregulated, free market, fast-food, disposable culture was about to collapse of its own weight and design.
Many saw a silver lining in the insane economic practices in that when it all did collapse the opportunity to institute a new sustainable model would be so robust as to make going back to our old ways impossible.
But when the rubber met the road as it has in the last year or so, when the rotten fruits of our pie-hole stuffing ethos stood naked before the same people who screamed for sustainability, they began begging for one last chance to patch up the bullet riddled corporate corpus and individual greed that is at the root of the debacle.
“Do something- anything” we scream to our DC politicians, “but don’t take away my 30-minute delivered pizza or my 75” flat screen TV”.
“Reign in the Wall Street crooks and jail the bankers and insurance companies who caused this” we scream “but don’t take away any of my six 0% Platinum Visa cards.”
“It’s time to institute ‘Zero Waste’ programs” we beg as we gobble up our GMO-corn-fed fatburger plate lunch and toss the Styrofoam container in an opaque trash can to be transferred to someone else’s backyard where we can’t see or smell it.
“We all need to use public transportation” we yell out the window of our gas guzzling jalopy that’s forever stuck in traffic gridlock.
Within a few days- or even hours- America will be spending another trillion dollars. But in typical “fire, ready, aim” fashion none of the fundamentals of the economic system that got us here will have been reversed, redefined, revised or re-regulated before we do.
Even though we see clearly how the insanity of mindless consumerism bought us all dwellings with funny money to go with our $100,000 in consumer debt, we yet again bow down to the gods of mindless purchasing when told that if we want this crisis to magically end, the banks must start lending and we must start spending money that doesn’t exist... again.
What are we- a bunch of freakin’ idiots?
It’s far worse than doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It’s like we know exactly what we are doing to cause our demise but instead of doing less of it we think our only chance is to buy enough bubble gum, paper clips and duct tape to make Humpty Dumpty, if not whole, at vaguely least egg-shaped..
We look around and see millions of unemployed and look into the precipice of a new great depression but is our response to examine why those jobs selling each other chalupas, texting minutes and Hummers are disappearing?
No our new leader says – we just need to pump cash into the pockets of those who provided those jobs so they can create more of the same stupid, needless and destructive jobs.
No, our new leader says- we will make sure the construction workers who built all those now-empty houses can keep building useless and long-term destructive structures and more highways and more bridges for our personal, dirty sooty-carbon-spewing, oversized driving machines instead of clean green public transport.
No, our new leader says- even though we know exactly who created this fiscal mess and how it happened, instead of first ending the derivative, hedge-fund, shareholder comes first, rich get richer, theft-based approach we’ll just pump another trillion on top of the last trillion into the economically and morally bankrupt practices of the past.
Apparently the same people who were shrieking “sustainability” last year are now looking for all the old unsustainable economic models and practices to make them whole again so that then and only then can they work on sustainable solutions.
Today, on the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, the witching hour is upon us. It’s time to ask if we are just plain too dumb to survive.
If our response to today’s opportunity is to panic at the prospect of tomorrow’s crisis perhaps our last best chance to sustain- in fact survive- as a species has come and gone.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
GREEN WITH ENVY
GREEN WITH ENVY: When Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, legendary satirist-songwriting Tom Lehrer said the event “made political satire obsolete” and so he gave up on trying to outdo reality.
But we persevere since in the intervening 35 years those kinds of nuggets have become so overarching that we’ve become attenuated to it and seldom even realize the bizarre nature of what we’ve just heard.
Last night we were barely paying attention to a network news piece on the pervasiveness of “green” products these days where a reporter at a trade show of these everyday consumer goods was telling us how all how corporate America is “going green”.
Suddenly everything you buy is “green”. From environmentally sound internal combustion cars to “clean coal” to Sierra Club endorsed Clorox every manufacturer with a product to push has jumped on the “sustainability” bandwagon.
And how did they do that- why by advertising their new found concern for “mother earth” and “the children”.
That same toxic product we former eschewed has been miraculously transformed, not by changing the contents but by changing the perception of it.
The reporter, in a wishy washy attempt at “exposing” the “greenwashing “scam- which nowadays involves little more than a raised eyebrow and a sneering tone of voice on the part of the TV correspondent- ended the piece with a short quote from what appeared to be a “spokesperson” for the new green industry.
He apparently WAS worried about the future- the future not of the human race or the planet but of this “environmentally conscious” form of product promotion.
Was he afraid people would catch on to the lack of sustainability in producing mass-market environmentally-sensitive products with none of that messy environmental sensitivity?
No. He said the real problem for green product makers was that ”this whole sustainability thing is probably just a fad.”
And that’s how big business sees it- it’s just a “sustainability fad”- the oxymoronic phrase of the decade.
The notion of creating a planet that won’t kill us all will eventually just be a passing fancy like the hula hoop or the pet rock. Soon we’ll be back to our good old profligate ways, stuffing out faces with deep-fried candy bars and our pockets with iphones and credit cards.
A. blue tooth in every ear and 1000 channels of digital. flat-screen, remote controlled circuses in front of every eyeball.
And you know what- the spokesperson may be right because at this very moment we are teetering on the cultural and economic precipice of a see-saw and one way or the other, it’s all downhill from here.
And our bet’s on the fat guy.
It’s almost impossible to underestimate the depths of depravity of American consumerism.
Despite 30 years of consciousness raising through things like the last Friday’s “Buy Nothing Day” movement and the Reverend Billy’s boisterous bullhorn-blasted “sermons” at the Times Square Disney Store, people are still willing to stampede the Wal Mart doors and trample clerks to get a good deals on random small appliances.
When you ask the average European- or even the jihadi-on-the-street- what they really find odious about the U.S. is our worship at the altar of the shopping mall- not the products themselves but our decadent avariciousness for them.
With our economy finally returning to reality in recent months, cutting back on the purchase of crap we don’t need- and will throw away in a matter of months to get another one we don’t need- anti-consumerism in general has become a concept people are finally embracing, if not intellectually, out of necessity.
But not if our new “green” advertising executive and the sycophantic “business news” cheerleaders can help it.
Because as they become aware of people’s bent to examine our disposable culture they seem intent on convincing us to eschew this opportunity to dial it back a notch and encourage us to spend even more... all to “save the economy”.
Who hasn’t seen one of those little PR pieces disguised as economic “news you can use” espousing the cockamamie notion that the only way our economy will improve is if we go out and spend more money we don’t have- just like we did during the recent EZ credit era.
And just in case you didn’t quite get the memo, interspersed between those news pieces are ads for “0% interest until 2010 when you use your credit card” or “no payment until after the holidays” from the same credit card people who brought you this mess in the first place.
Just ignore that recent notice that your default rate was going up to 29.99%.APR.
Yes the problem in all this is not that we’ve all got more debt that we could ever hope to pay off but the fact that we aren’t quite deeply in debt enough to “get the economy rolling again”.
So buy another flat-screen TV for the bathroom and order a few more pizza’s with double-everything – the more you spend the more you’ll have when this sustainability fad is over.
But we persevere since in the intervening 35 years those kinds of nuggets have become so overarching that we’ve become attenuated to it and seldom even realize the bizarre nature of what we’ve just heard.
Last night we were barely paying attention to a network news piece on the pervasiveness of “green” products these days where a reporter at a trade show of these everyday consumer goods was telling us how all how corporate America is “going green”.
Suddenly everything you buy is “green”. From environmentally sound internal combustion cars to “clean coal” to Sierra Club endorsed Clorox every manufacturer with a product to push has jumped on the “sustainability” bandwagon.
And how did they do that- why by advertising their new found concern for “mother earth” and “the children”.
That same toxic product we former eschewed has been miraculously transformed, not by changing the contents but by changing the perception of it.
The reporter, in a wishy washy attempt at “exposing” the “greenwashing “scam- which nowadays involves little more than a raised eyebrow and a sneering tone of voice on the part of the TV correspondent- ended the piece with a short quote from what appeared to be a “spokesperson” for the new green industry.
He apparently WAS worried about the future- the future not of the human race or the planet but of this “environmentally conscious” form of product promotion.
Was he afraid people would catch on to the lack of sustainability in producing mass-market environmentally-sensitive products with none of that messy environmental sensitivity?
No. He said the real problem for green product makers was that ”this whole sustainability thing is probably just a fad.”
And that’s how big business sees it- it’s just a “sustainability fad”- the oxymoronic phrase of the decade.
The notion of creating a planet that won’t kill us all will eventually just be a passing fancy like the hula hoop or the pet rock. Soon we’ll be back to our good old profligate ways, stuffing out faces with deep-fried candy bars and our pockets with iphones and credit cards.
A. blue tooth in every ear and 1000 channels of digital. flat-screen, remote controlled circuses in front of every eyeball.
And you know what- the spokesperson may be right because at this very moment we are teetering on the cultural and economic precipice of a see-saw and one way or the other, it’s all downhill from here.
And our bet’s on the fat guy.
It’s almost impossible to underestimate the depths of depravity of American consumerism.
Despite 30 years of consciousness raising through things like the last Friday’s “Buy Nothing Day” movement and the Reverend Billy’s boisterous bullhorn-blasted “sermons” at the Times Square Disney Store, people are still willing to stampede the Wal Mart doors and trample clerks to get a good deals on random small appliances.
When you ask the average European- or even the jihadi-on-the-street- what they really find odious about the U.S. is our worship at the altar of the shopping mall- not the products themselves but our decadent avariciousness for them.
With our economy finally returning to reality in recent months, cutting back on the purchase of crap we don’t need- and will throw away in a matter of months to get another one we don’t need- anti-consumerism in general has become a concept people are finally embracing, if not intellectually, out of necessity.
But not if our new “green” advertising executive and the sycophantic “business news” cheerleaders can help it.
Because as they become aware of people’s bent to examine our disposable culture they seem intent on convincing us to eschew this opportunity to dial it back a notch and encourage us to spend even more... all to “save the economy”.
Who hasn’t seen one of those little PR pieces disguised as economic “news you can use” espousing the cockamamie notion that the only way our economy will improve is if we go out and spend more money we don’t have- just like we did during the recent EZ credit era.
And just in case you didn’t quite get the memo, interspersed between those news pieces are ads for “0% interest until 2010 when you use your credit card” or “no payment until after the holidays” from the same credit card people who brought you this mess in the first place.
Just ignore that recent notice that your default rate was going up to 29.99%.APR.
Yes the problem in all this is not that we’ve all got more debt that we could ever hope to pay off but the fact that we aren’t quite deeply in debt enough to “get the economy rolling again”.
So buy another flat-screen TV for the bathroom and order a few more pizza’s with double-everything – the more you spend the more you’ll have when this sustainability fad is over.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
